I have become a small a part of David Cameron's "big society". Islington is my corner of London and, contrary to stereotype, latte-slurping, croissant-nibbling liberals do not fill its every street. Around the islands of prosperity laps a grey ocean of poverty. Islington is the eighth-poorest borough in England, with suicide rates that can match the worst in the country. About one-third of its residents are in social housing, although where they will be living after government commissars have cleared the poor from their homes is anyone's guess.
Local charities had already done what Conservatives and Liberals want them to do and formed a campaign group, Islington Giving, to raise money and volunteers to fill the gaps left by the shrinking state. After writing a few press releases – as I said, my contribution was shamefully small – I have learned that there is little point in leftists denigrating volunteers, particularly if they are scoffing at those who are more willing than they are to give money and time to others.
Public-school conservatives are in power, however, not the left, and their prejudices matter more. I accept David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith are not members of a conspiracy of plutocrats but well-meaning men, who look at the billions spent to keep millions in idleness and wish to reform the system. The trouble is that they do not understand how the system mistreats the poor and inarticulate. Inadvertently or not, they are ensuring that the law will not hear their appeals when they protest against injustice.
I doubt many Observer readers understand either. To be educated and middle class is to know how to raise your voice without losing your temper; how to ask in an icy tone for a bureaucrat's name and the contact details of his superior, while leaving the question: "Do you know who I am and how much trouble I can cause you?" hanging in the air.
The poor do not know how to contest the decisions of the insolent and incompetent. Putting aside the lack of education, 40% of people on the current incapacity benefit are mentally ill, according to Mind, because if you're not depressed when you begin long-term unemployment you damn well will be a few months down the line. Add to the ill-educated and the sick the immigrants whose ability to complain is further handicapped by their inability to understand English and you gain some idea of the poor's need for advocates to speak when they cannot. Long before the Conservatives invented the slogan, the big society was providing them.
The charities I have been associated with have been funding the Islington Law Centre, which deals with hundreds of cases of debt, underpaid benefits, poor housing and unfair dismissal a week. City lawyers, on the receiving end of harsh words from me and my comrades in the liberal media, turn out to be better people than most journalists. Staff from Slaughter and May, Mayer Brown, Cameron McKenna and Eversheds come to work for nothing on behalf of the disadvantaged.
They confront a system of extraordinary regulatory complexity – one senior lawyer told me that benefit cases were the hardest he had tackled – that is looking ever more biased. Medicals for incapacity benefit are the greatest scandal. The state has contracted them out to a private company called Atos Origin. Journalists have taken at face value ministers' claims that Atos is finding that the mad are sane, the crippled mobile and the sick well.
An unbelievable 75% of people on incapacity benefit were nothing more than scroungers, Atos said, who are fit to work and can thus have their benefit reduced from £96.85 a week to £65.45. Less well reported are the alarming number of successful appeals against Atos's decisions, which cast doubt on the credibility of the process. Citizens Advice says 40% of claimants who appeal succeed. No one should be surprised. Doctors working for Atos told the BBC they were under pressure to do quick cheap checks and declare patients fit. At the Islington Law Centre, the success rate on appeals is 80%.
While I was there, angry lawyers were discussing a local woman Atos had declared hale and hearty, even though she barely spoke, rarely went out of the house and had tried to commit suicide just before her assessment.
If such cases are new to you, that is because of the class bias of "the national conversation". We talk about how students fear debt and the middle class fear being squeezed, but hardly mention the terror of sick and distressed people that the state will cut their tiny incomes and tell them to apply for jobs they have no hope of getting.
Soon, many will be without the help they need to challenge officialdom. The real malice in the government's policy lies not in specific economies, but in the state's silencing of the voices who can speak for the poor before courts and tribunals. Even in inner London, with one of the richest square miles on Earth on the doorstep, anti-poverty charities find it incredibly difficult to raise money. A few good people and organisations give much. Most give nothing.
Outside the capital, law centres do not have any neighbourhood philanthropists. I am sure they wish they did. The recession has bought a 30% increase in their workload, as the losers from the financial crisis pour through their doors. But they, like their colleagues in London, must rely primarily on discretionary grants from local government, which will soon vanish, as councils hack back their budgets to meet the government's demands for austerity.
The other source of advocacy is legally aided solicitors' firms. They are already closing because Labour cut the budget for social welfare law. Many more will be doomed if Ken Clarke follows up by ruling that housing, benefit and debt cases should not receive a penny of public support.
The government is ensuring that tribunals and courts cannot review many, maybe a majority, of decisions by private and public bureaucracies to force the poor from their homes or deny them benefit. I asked Richard Miller, legal aid manager for the Law Society, if I would be guilty of journalistic hyperbole if I wrote that on basic questions of access to shelter and a minimum income the poor would soon be outside the rule of law.
"Oh no," he said. "You wouldn't be exaggerating at all."